Elim Community Forum

 Band of Brothers Broken by War
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Jim Burton thinks about the bond he missed with his two brothers, who died in World War II?
 Scott Turner, For the Kitsap Sun
 Jim Burton of Allyn lost two brothers just months apart in the same year as they fought in the skies over Europe during World War IL
 “M9035 deeply regrets to advise you that your son Sergeant Robert William Burton (Air Gunner, R. 192592) was killed on active service overseas on January 23, 1944 stop.
 “Please except my profound sympathy stop. R.C.A.F. Casualty Officer…”
 After reading the Western Union telegram his mother received years ago, Jim Burton’s mind drifted far from his wife, Arlene, and the kitchen table in their Allyn condo and back to his childhood.
 War memorabilia was spread across the table, filling the room with a musty scent.
 “This is their life. This is them. This is all I’ve got left of my brothers. I barely got to know them at all,” Burton, 75, said, referring to a pile of crusty pictures, bound letters and official military documents.
 “They never really got to enjoy life, either. Neither one had an opportunity to really live, as they both went off to war so young,” he said.
 His two brothers died, their planes going down in flames, only months apart in 1944.
 Raised in West Seattle by Irish immigrant parents, Jim said he had a pretty typical childhood with his three older siblings: Robert, Norman, and Kathleen.
 He recalled his brothers as being popular and quite active.
 “Bob did a lot of skiing, and really loved the mountains and the sky,” Jim said. “And Norman was very athletic, and was more into wrestling, cheerleading and roller‑skating than anything else.”
 Times were tough growing up during this period, but they made due, he said.
 “My brothers were off doing their thing. I was just too young to be doing stuff and being involved with them,” he said. “So I never had the opportunity for a real close relationship with either of them.”
 His sister, Kathleen Fields, 81, remembered her brothers more vividly because she was closer in age to them.
 “I remember Bob and Nor dotting the ceiling of their boyhood bedroom with model airplanes hanging in all manner of attack mode,” Fields said from her Palm Springs, Calif., home.
 Her brothers often dreamed of the day they would point the nose of a real plane into the wild blue yonder, she said.
 The call of duty during World War II is ultimately what put their dreams into action. When the time came, they didn’t even have to think twice about which branch of the service to join, Kathleen said.
 “They were fliers in their hearts and souls,” she said.
 THE WAR
 When his brothers went into service, Jim Burton was about 10 years old.
 Bob Burton enlisted first. With Canada being active in World War 11 before the United States, Bob joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) on Sept. 21, 1942 ‑ anxious for action.
 Norman joined the Army Air Corp shortly thereafter ‑ on Feb. 23, 1943.
 “Bob was determined to fly a plane, but at the time they were short of gunners not pilots, so he was sent to gunnery school for training,” Jim said.
 After Bob’s training with the RCAF, he shipped overseas to an airfield in northern Scotland the most northern tip, to a tiny village called Lossimouth.
 It was a lot like England, where they just graded off some land and it became an instant airfield for different bomber groups, Jim said.
 Bob was the tail gunner on a British‑made Lancaster bomber.
 At nearly the same time, his brother Norman became a belly gunner on a B‑17 Flying Fortress flying out of England with missions in and out of Germany.
 Back at the kitchen table in Allyn, Jim gingerly unfolded one of the last letters his mother, Nora, ever received from Bob. His aging fingers caressed the feather‑light treasure that contained a specific message for him.
 ”To Jim,
 … Remember the time I was home on leave and you shouted after me as I started off down the street ‘to get a couple (Japanese) Zeros’ for you?
 “I couldn’t help but smile to myself that you may not have been so far wrong at that, but if I say: here, wouldn’t a Messerschmitt or Junker 88 do as well …?”
 Jim looked up from the discolored note with a slight chuckle, but the tears in his eyes indicated the memory jabbed at his heart.
 Bob was in Scotland only a short time before he was killed in an unexplained bomber crash.
 “My mother was never given details, nor could we find out much about the circumstances when we visited Scotland years later (since it was no longer an RCAF base),” Kathleen said.
 A young Kathleen was sitting in class at West Seattle High School when she got called to the office and told to go home for an emergency. She feared that something had happened to her mother. Instead, upon arriving home, she found out the news from the coldly worded telegram.
 “I still recall the gut hit, an internal thud, Kathleen said.”As a school girl I had never considered such a thing could happen. It made mom an old woman like, boom, overnight.”
 Jim Burton was too young to remember many of the details, but one memory has stuck with him.
 “I can visualize her putting flowers on their pictures by the radio,” Jim said. “She never could accept it or get over it until the day she died.”
 “… Full military honours were accorded. The Air Force Pipe Band which led the funeral parade played a Lament. Twelve aircrew Sergeants acted as pall bearers. At the conclusion of the prayers at the grave, a firing party fired three volleys and a trumpeter sounded ‘Last Post’ and ‘Reveille’…
 ‑Royal Canadian Air Force Chaplain Service Officer
 At the time of Bob’s death, Norman was still actively bombing Germany.
 He was on what was called a “shuttle flight.” His plane flew from England, bombed Germany, then landed in Russia to refuel and reload more bombs.
 “Norman said he made his missions, and it was always pretty tough to get their sorties in. They just didn’t know whether they’d make it back alive,” Kathleen said.
 One day, she said, a crew member from another plane got sick and her brother Norman volunteered to take that flight “to get another mission sortie under his belt.”
 Norman got shot down on that plane about three months after his brother went down.
 His plane was intercepted by German fighters and shot down in flames on the return trip to England.
 “We got a letter from the captain of his bomber group that said Nor’s plane got hit and he watched it go down in a dive toward the Baltic Sea,” Fields said. “An Air Force buddy of his later wrote details I am everlastingly grateful my mother never read.”
 Fields relayed her thoughts on the somber day her mother received the second wire death notification from the war department.
 “The sorrow overwhelmed. Life became gray. Days were a oneness of tears, and the nights went on forever,” she said.
 “Even as a girl it consumed my waking thoughts. I was an inadequate support for a mother who never recovered,” Kathleen said.
 Jim looked back and forth at his wife for support as he queried his memory bank.
 “I really can’t recall as to what my feelings were at that point in time as such a young kid.
 “It always seemed that I was robbed of personally never getting to know them, though. They had to give their lives up so far away at such a young age,” he said.
 Arlene sympathizes with the difficulty the family would have had in mourning two brothers who died so close together.
 “It wasn’t like their bodies came home and everyone had closure. You have one in Scotland and one buried at the bottom of the Baltic Sea,” she said.
 Arlene was close with her mother‑in‑law. Nora Burton was instrumental in the founding of the Gold Stars, a service group for mothers who lost their children in war.
 “The Gold Stars were active with the war memorial in Seattle, too. The old original pylon memorial is long gone, but the good thing is, there is another one there called a Garden of Remembrance, located at the downtown Benaroya Hall,” Arlene said.
 “It really is quite lovely, it’s a beautiful tribute to all the service members that fought in all the theaters of war,” she said.
 “We visit his brothers often,” she said, referring to the site that honors them and the countless other Washington state residents who have died in service to their country.
 MEMORIAL DAY
 Jim Burton took a deep breath as his eyes locked onto a wobbly stack of dispatched mail, stamped “Return To Sender…”
 “Heroes, you betcha, they’re heroes… Bob and Norman gave the supreme sacrifice to make a better world for everybody,” he said. “The daily life things citizens of our country are enjoying now (in part) are certainly attributed to their sacrifice.”
 He said generations now hardly understand what happened in World War II and all the sacrifices people actually made.
 “I don’t condone war, but when there is a necessity and your country calls upon you to serve, without question all that do are absolute heroes,” Jim said.
 The Memorial Day holiday prompts thoughts of his childhood and his brothers. He said he often wonders what life would be like had his two brothers been there to grow older alongside him.
 BACK AT THE TABLE
 As Arlene Burton dug for a specific paper, she mentioned that Nora never wanted - and even refused ‑ to sign Jim up for service during the Korean War. She had given up enough to the military, she thought.
 Arlene found her one of her favorite mementos from the old documents and photos scattered about the table.
 “Jim’s mom wrote all her thoughts down onto pieces of paper and turned them into little poems. She called her collection her ‘Wee Book of Poems, “and we ended up finding all of them,” she said.
 Arlene eyed her husband, took a breath and read…
 For Bob and Norman’s birthdays:
 They were ready to meet their pilot who watched them coasting through the blue, who saw their sacrifice they made for freedom and knew them to be brave, clean and true. Oh do not count their youth a wasted flower, nor do not say they did not win their wings, beyond the cloud where they often glided, their sprit singing and flying wings…,
 ‑Love Mom.”
 Copyright 2007, kitsapsun.com. All Rights Reserved.
 

And this second article was on the same page:
 Lost Boys’ Memories Ingrained in Wood
 A sister’s dream is fulfilled in a fitting memorial for two brothers lost during Word War II.
 By Scott Turner, For the Kitsap Sun May 27, 2007
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Jim Burton sits in front of the totem pole at a site in north Mason County’s Tahuya forest. The pole was by made in honor of his brothers, Robert and Norman, both of whom were killed in combat during WWII.
 Before Norman and Robert Burton left to fight in World War II, their family met for a special visit under a large totem pole in Seattle’s Pioneer Square.
 The moment would prove significant, after both men, the brothers of Jim Burton, now of Allyn, did not return from their duty. Robert W. Burton was killed in action on January 23, 1944 and Norman H. Burton was killed in action on April 9, 1944.
 The family never forgot the totem.
 A few years ago Jim and Arlene Burton found themselves bouncing along in their van onward, kicking up dust and splashing random mud puddles as they trekked a windy dirt road.
 The Burtons rolled to a stop five feet from a closed iron gate. A fence with Indian symbols and a high‑arched sign that read “Camp Hohabas” stood above them.
 After sweet talking the Boy Scout of America Camp Ranger for entry, the Burtons were off again, to find the elusive roadside entrance to the Bear Bowl. The couple made their way up a trail that ended at a huge wooden‑benched bowl.
 Like a pair of powerful watchdogs, a carved bear stood on one corner of the amphitheater stage. On the other, a pole decorated with warriors - the memorial to brothers for the past seven years.
 Hand in hand, the Burtons’ silence spoke volumes.
 In the early 1990s, Burton’s sister Kathleen Fields learned of Native American woodcarvers who may have been able to help with her vision of building a totem pole. She drove with a friend to the Makah Reservation, on the northern tip of the Olympic Peninsula.
 Although there were no totems in sight, Fields found an information center and a “sweet‑faced Makah woman that greeted us with a smile.”
 After telling the woman what she was looking for, Fields was given directions to a carver and told: “He might be interested in your project.”
 Woodcarver Frank Smith invited Fields and her friend into his trailer, had a salmon lunch and discussed the possibility of carving her dream totem pole.
 Smith too was a World War II veteran, and knew the look in her eye. He said the totem pole would be a year in the making.
 “Well, a year later, just as Frank promised, I went back. Euphoria overwhelmed as the pole was carried out of his carving shed by six young Makah men,” Fields said.
 “From the bottom of the pole I rubbed my fingers over the cedar carvings of two fierce warriors with threatening teeth, armed with arrows. They represent strength and power, my brother strong in the face of battle,” Fields said.
 A long female whale featuring stretched, sorrowful tears was the next carving. It represented Kathleen and Jim’s mother grieving over the loss of her two sons. Above that were a set of arrows pointing toward the heavens signifying “battle ready.” On the outstretched wings of the warriors were carved circles, the totem symbol for flight.
 On top sits a black raven, she described, a figure of prestige and a cultural hero of the Coastal Indian Peoples.
 Fields then planned to move to California. But she wanted desperately to keep the Northwest family idol here in Washington.
 That’s when Jim and his wife Arlene piled into their van and headed out of their cozy Allyn, Wash. condo development toward the picturesque Tahuya Forest in Mason County, a site they now visit regularly.
 “Kate would not let this pole go until she presented it her way,” Arlene Burton said.
 “We had this absolutely incredible service,” said Jim Burton of the event held more than five years ago now, pointing to a trail leading into the popular Boy Scout huddle bowl.
 “The Makah’s carried my brother’s pole into the Bear Bowl from the woods with drums beating. You could have heard a pin drop in this place,” Jim Burton said.
 Looking out across an arena full of hundreds of scouts and Makah Indians, Kathleen Fields finished her tearful dedication speech with one simple paragraph.
 “My two brothers proudly lived out their brief lives by the Boy Scout Oath: On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country.”
 Copyright 2007, kitsapsun.com. All Rights Reserved.